Usually, an automatic machine for making filter-paper pods, containing doses of infusion product comprises a production line having a plurality of operating stations located one after the other along it and at the end of which a continuous strip of pods, that is to say, two superposed webs of filter paper heat sealed to each other and having interposed, at regular intervals, a plurality of infusion product charges, is divided up at a cutting station into individual single-use pods separated by waste material.
Downstream of the cutting station, the pod making machine has an end outfeed station equipped with pick and place means designed to pick up the pods one by one and place them on conveyors that transport them to packaging devices which wrap them in respective heat-sealed overwraps. In another solution, which this invention specifically refers to, the outfeed station comprises conveyor means for advancing the groups of pods, preferably stacked, towards packaging units where the groups of pods are picked up and fed by complex mechanical devices into forming assemblies which pack them in packages such as, for example, bag-like packets.
In other words, packaging the groups of pods requires conveyor means for handling and moving the pods from the machine that makes them to the bagging units which, in some cases, may be located some distance away.
A structure of this kind has considerable disadvantages due not only to the presence of the conveyor means required to transport the grouped pods to the packaging units, which greatly increase the overall dimensions of the pod making machine that mounts them, but also and above all to the complexity of the mechanical structural components of the packaging units themselves.
Other major difficulties are caused by the handling and positioning of the pod stacks since the pods are gravity fed into the bags in an uncontrolled manner leading to their being incorrectly arranged in the bags.
The aim of this invention is to provide a pod packaging machine that is free of the above mentioned disadvantages.